All the Windwracked Stars (The Edda of Burdens) (8 page)

When he rubs his palms across his eyes, all he feels is dust.

It’s soft.

He reaches out a gloved hand and strokes the root he shelters behind. Something is carved there: a rune, a summoning. The most secret spell of all. One a god gave his life and sight for. The wolf hooks his fingertips into the gap. These are Muire’s dreams he is dreaming; this is Muire’s sleep he is sleeping. She is frail, worn, ancient. Almost mortal now. She eats, she bleeds, she sleeps, she pisses. Like any animal.

She dreams.

And having devoured her, the Grey Wolf dreams, as well. He dreams of rain but wakes to fire. He is burning, burning still, burning behind his heart, burning along his bones. His bed of snow cannot cool him.

It’s the price you pay forever, when you swallow down the sun.

I
n the morning, Muire came home. She took a rickshaw from the clinic on Brightside, dozing in the seat, her animal body desperate for the sleep she begrudged it. Rubber and aluminum wheels rattled over broken stones, the driver jogging through dawn-empty streets, bearing her past the gibbet at Hangman. She cradled her arm, which was immobilized in an inflatable cast, and tried not to blink too much because the insides of her eyelids felt scratchy.

She’d slept in the clinic, pain-hazed, half-conscious. It would have to be enough, for a little. She had the driver drop her off downtown, nearly on her doorstep, and paid him for the return trip too.

What use scrip, to an angel?

Moreso, it turned out, than one might have expected.

She stayed in a courtyard industrial building on the water-front, which might be said to have been converted to a studio, if one were speaking charitably. The heavy doors of wire-mesh-reinforced glass unlocked to her key and thumbprint; when they swung open, she found herself in a slate-tiled entry. The door beyond led to the workspace.

The foundry.

The glass wall to the courtyard admitted natural light, three stories’ worth. Much of the main room had always been open space, high and airy for the absent mill machines. Where it had not been, Muire had torn out the second and third floors, leaving only the support members—beams thick with the memory of such trees as no longer grew on Valdyrgard, notched into the red-brick walls—and a four hundred square foot section of the overseer’s office, reached by an iron spiral stair, as her apartment.

For now, the whole space stood empty and full of morning light, the only motion her neighbor in the courtyard, his head down over his watering. She didn’t garden, herself, and it seemed a kind of sin to let it go uncultivated.

Within the door, she paused and threw the locks. The evidence of her long tenure was everywhere in her studio. The slate floor was scarred, and splashed metal had congealed in gouges left by the feet of giant machines. She hung Nathr on her hook, stripped off the ruins of her cloak—fumbling one-handed—and left a trail of armor behind her as she staggered toward the shower. And if her neighbor happened to glance up and catch a glimpse of her sexlessly bony frame right now, she couldn’t be bothered to care.

The water was hot, at least, the catch basin on the rooftop full after last night’s downpour. The pressure dropped occasionally—Sig filling his watering can or rinsing his hands—but Muire didn’t care, any more than she cared about the soap and water squelching unpleasantly between her skin and the inflatable cast.

The hot water was strength, at least temporary strength, and she took it, leaning against the wall of the shower, eyes closed, breathing.

Eat.

Her eyes opened. She realized that she had been sliding down the tiles, that bent knees and a braced hand were not enough to keep her from collapsing under the water.

Eat
, Kasimir repeated.
Sleep. You will be of no service if you find him and are too weary to make an accounting.

It was better advice than she was likely to offer herself, though she hated to take it. She rinsed off under colder water, hissing at the sting against her face, awkwardly dried herself with the scraper, and found her robe and a towel for her hair. The stairs were too much to consider; instead, she wandered out into the sun barefoot, wincing.

Her neighbor was crouched under the arbor, hand-pollinating sweet peas.

“Sig,” she said.

A cheerful grunt emerged from under his hat. That was her entire image of him; the torn corduroy trousers, the floppy hat with the plaid, frayed fabric band, the mass of keloid scarring along his jaw, his blue eyes bright against the purple-red flesh. “The blackberries are in,” he said, and squatted down to hand up a bowl. “And you need to eat some of this squash. It’s taking the place over.”

“I’ll make bread with it,” she said, a yawn cracking her jaw. “You know, Blodwyn the Adamant and her men would most likely have fallen because of scurvy when they were holding the pass above Arden, if it had not been for the blackberries. They only had flour and salt, and they hunted rabbits. There wasn’t much to a rabbit except protein. But there’s thirty milligrams of vitamin C in a cup of blackberries.”

“You talk about these people as if you knew them,” Sig said, amused.

Muire licked her lips. “I was a historian.” When she reached for the bowl of berries, he paused.

“Your hand.”

“I had a bad night,” she admitted.

He regarded her, the blue inflatable cast, the red and purple plastic bowl. “Go on inside,” he said. “I’ll come and make you some breakfast in a minute.”

“Sig—”

“No argument.”

“Do I look helpless?”

He looked her up and down, bare feet and improvised turban and threadbare robe and skinny legs and broken hand. “No,” he said. “You look tired and half starved. Go on in.”

She went.

W
hen Muire had come to live here, the warehouse had represented an obscene amount of space for one woman. But during the refugee years, her floors had been covered in pallets, and she had been a hero for a little while.

And then she had been the woman on the corner, who had been an artist before the war and was a soldier now. And then she had been the old nearman who some people said had fought for Thjierry Thorvaldsdottir, and who couldn’t be a real person, not quite, because she never got any older. And if someone whispered that she was a made-person, a halfman living on her own, unsupervised—some rich man’s escaped toy—well, it was the end of the world.

There were fewer rules against freedom.

Now, Eiledon was cramped with people—though fewer, she thought, every year—but much of the riverfront stood
empty. It was their only cemetery, and prone to fire. Muire—whose youth had been spent in communal longhouses, the only privacy that of the woods, or the silence inside one’s own mind—was grateful that Sig now occupied the other half of the building. It had stood empty for a long while, and she’d hated the blind windows and the echoes.

Because now she was just Muire, who lived beside the river-walk and who had no visible means of support and who joined in the neighborhood patrols. Muire, who had no last name and therefore wasn’t truman and therefore didn’t matter to anyone. And that was as she wished it: she was a sparrow by preference, not an eagle.

But now the Grey Wolf had come to her. And now, as in the past, she must become a sparrow hawk.

Sig fed her, as good as his word, and left her alone with the food and a pot of tea. She ate one-handed, bracing the bowl against her cast.

Once she could have willed the injury to mend. Now, she thought she could speed the healing, but not as weary as she was, and not before breakfast.

The past, she decided, as she caught herself thinking
once
once more, had all come tumbling down on her in battalions.

Vengeance,
said Ingraham Fasoltsen, as she pushed the bowl away.

“Vengeance,” she answered. “I’m working on it.”

She stood, and wobbled. The dishes could wait. Her loft was too far away. But Muire was no stranger to discomfort. And it would not, after all, be the first time anyone had slept on her foundry floor.

________

I
ngraham Fasoltsen’s body was found by a moreaux patrol at the foot of the Broken Stair half an hour after sunrise. Selene was the first lieutenant to arrive, descending with perfect poise on an antigrav skimmer no bigger than a dinner plate. It would have given most trumans fits, but for Selene it was as safe and convenient a passage as descending a stair.

She stepped lightly onto the cobbles and paused, as the patrol lead turned to meet her. Achilles was a hound, silky-eared and alert, tawny fur showing between the strips of his half-gauntlets. Where Selene carried her monofilament whip, he wore two brace of daggers, one set on each thigh. His tail fanned slowly when he saw her; Achilles was an old friend.

They touched noses, and she smelled the worry on him. His nostrils twitched. “She sent you,” he said, reading Her scent on Selene as if reading a name signed to a card. “Personally.”

“Fasoltsen was Hers,” Selene said, and did not tell him about the package.

Fasoltsen lay crumpled by the intersection of the Broken Stair and the undamaged one, his hips twisted to the side, his arms spread wide. Selene wondered how many passersby had picked their way over the delicately cupped hand that lay athwart the stair, and how many of them had taken time to rifle the body.

Achilles turned to invite her into the circle around the body, and gave her a sideways eyeroll. “Your scent was on him.” Not an accusation. Not even a suggestion. Just a fact.

If She had sent Selene, then She was not concerned that Selene’s scent was on the body. And so Achilles was not concerned, either.

“He made a delivery.” She paused, as she came downwind of the body. “No blood.”

“No.” He sniffed, as the other two unmans—another dog, prick-eared and fuzzy, and a brown-and-white skewbald rat with long nervous hands—fell back. “There’s more scent.”

“That musk. It’s rank.” The same she’d caught last night, drifting from the Well.

With an effort, Selene quelled her flehmen response. There were trumans about, observers and some Mongrels. They might mistake it for a snarl.

“Can you smell the others?”

She sniffed, lightly, and sneezed. “We’re not all hounds.”

But she crouched beside the body nonetheless, balanced on the tough pads of her elongated feet. She placed her elbows on her knees and craned her neck, surveying the scene from closer now. Selene might not be a hound, but even after sunrise this intersection lay in the shadow of Her Tower, and would until afternoon. Hers was the dark-adapted eye.

“Is there rigor?” she asked. She wasn’t ready to touch the dead man yet.

She remembered the brush of his hand, the nervousness as he’d handed her the weapon, the determined lift of his jaw.

“And the livor is congealed,” Achilles said, referring to the settling of uncirculated blood. His voice had a sonorous, belling quality, even when he spoke softly, and the slow fan of his tail accelerated. It was not friendliness, now: he was on the hunt. “At least four hours.”

“And how many came up the stair, or along this road?”

“The scent’s under the dew.” She looked up at him and he shrugged. “It’s strong, but there’s a lot of it. Too many to count. I might be able to pick one out individually.”

“Mmm,” she said. She twisted her head to the side, ears flat,
her tail curving for balance. There was, indeed, dew. Enough to soak the fur on the underside of her tail into twisted spikes. “And how many touched the body?”

While Achilles spoke, Selene slowly focused her gaze from one end of Fasoltsen’s body to the other.

“Four,” he said. “The bottom layer is—”

“That,” she supplied, curling her lip.

He whuffed understanding. “And then something else, truman or nearman, female. She touched his hair and kissed him on the mouth.”

“Comforted him while he was dying? May I have a light along the body, please?”

The rat moved to oblige.

Achilles whined. “The one who stinks like a predator kissed him, too.”

White light, directional, spilled the length of Fasoltsen’s corpse. Selene ducked lower, looking for the telltale shine of fiber. She wished the hawk, Diana—the only hawk—were here. “Interesting,” she said. “Sexual assault?”

“It was only the two who came later that opened his clothes.”

“To search him.”

That little noise again. As if to say,
Your speculation, lead.
But not disagreeing with her.

Selene shifted her head, and a bright filament caught her attention. The leather armor on her thighs was sewn with tubular pockets: she slipped a claw into one and hooked forth a set of tweezers, delicately so as not to scratch the metal. Her claws were no longer the horny barbs of her dim recollection, when she had been only a huntress and a mother, before she had become Selene. The claws she wore now could slice bone or
gouge metal, and she had learned at painful cost to have a care for them.

There were no instincts to provide for what She had made of Her unmans.